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March 2026 marked the 250th anniversary of the publication of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). However, Adam Smith was also the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and it was through his continuous revisions of this earlier work that his more famous book emerged. One .. MORE
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Monetary Policy
When Winston Churchill was named Chancellor in November 1924, he is said to have assumed it was the largely ceremonial post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and was as surprised as anyone, given his lack of interest in economics, to find that it was Chancellor of the Exchequer, constitutionally the second most powerful .. MORE
Economic Theory
Market failure, which I am defining here as a market not reaching the equilibrium condition where quantity supplied equals quantity demanded, is ubiquitous. Every time we walk into stores, we see market failure happening: shelves and shelves of goods sit, waiting for buyers. This is excess supply (surplus), a market failure. If the market were .. MORE
Spontaneous Order and Social Coordination
“Social construction” is prominent: we are told in various places that this or that is a “social construct”: think of gender, race, or money. One book that played a central role in the emergence of that concept is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1966 The Social Construction of Reality. That work can proudly claim more .. MORE
Entrepreneurship
Adam Smith articulated the rhetoric of the Bourgeois Deal by highlighting fundamental differences among commercial, political, and martial societies. Everyone, he argued, is always practicing oratory on others and trying to persuade them to cooperate: “give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want.” Luke Froeb and his coauthors in .. MORE
Price Theory
This is the latest in our series of posts in our series on price theory problems with Professor Bryan Cutsinger. You can see all of Cutsinger’s problems and solutions by subscribing to his EconLog RSS feed. Share your proposed solutions in the comments. Professor Cutsinger will be present in the comments for the next couple .. MORE
Sam's Links
Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog, he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his and Links for April. Blogs and short links 1. Rest .. MORE
Tariffs
We’ve posted the second of two cross-posted articles with Law & Liberty in response to the Supreme Court ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump. Today, David Hebert explains why the economic fallout from the tariffs can’t be reversed by the Court’s ruling. From the article: Just over a year ago, citing the International Emergency Economic .. MORE
Labor Mobility, Immigration, Outsourcing
Even people who are otherwise enthusiastic about a free market in labor can get cold feet about immigration once redistribution enters the picture. Some are fond of quoting Milton Friedman, who famously (or infamously) said: “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” On this view, immigration is fine under fully .. MORE
Growth: Consequences
When astronaut Christina Koch, the first woman to fly around the moon, reported an issue from space that could have been copy-pasted from any IT helpdesk ticket, something clicked for Americans. Her grievance? “No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget.” .. MORE
Judy Shelton has earned media attention for her criticisms of Federal Reserve policy. In July of 2025, during an online interview with Steve Bannon, she accused Fed chair Jerome Powell of “setting himself up as some kind of an emperor” merely because he had tentatively predicted in his April remarks to the Economic Club of .. MORE
“[W]hatever we may think of Smith and the Wealth of Nations they did become symbolic of the new discipline of economics through the centuries and it hardly befits us to question the judgments of past generations’s assessments of the value of a work they read for themselves for their own purposes. It is a matter .. MORE
Centuries of argument have left a stubborn question unresolved: how much economic inequality is acceptable? Unlike inequalities rooted in race, gender, or disability—which typically attract broad moral condemnation—economic inequality in income, consumption, and wealth remains fiercely contested. That contestation does not result from a flaw in the debate; it is the debate’s defining feature. This .. MORE
David Ricardo. In a recent article in The Financial Times Nat Dyer argues that economists misunderstand tariffs.1 He points out that tariffs have political and moral dimensions not captured by standard economic reasoning. We therefore take economists’ widespread advocacy of free trade at our peril: “too few economic theorists have interrogated the actual, messy history .. MORE
Interesting stuff... One thought I had while reading it is that the argument has deeper roots than Smith. While Smith and Easterly are working with a more modern enlightenment/liberal scaffolding, the moral intuition behind the..
Student, May 26